tisdag, augusti 03, 2010

According to a French newspaper I read, the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, stated that there are 100 million women missing in the world!?The question following this was of course: Where are they? Disappeared, mutilated, drugged, dead from malnutrition and neglect before the age of one or as adolescents dead from HIV not being able to survive the brothels all over the world?The same article quoted an Indian saying that states:"Raising a girl, is like irrigating your neighbours garden", that is to say that it's a waste of time raising a girl in a family already struck by poverty.I hardly think (or hope) that a saying like this reflects the average man or woman less the majority of people living in India but we know that in China and India, having girls is not at all the same status as having boys.

In order to prevent some kind of bias in this, I would like to state that in most families around the world, a boy is seen as something more positive than a girl due to the fact that - not least the fathers - envision more possibilities for the boy to grow up and become succesful and rich than for the girl to achieve the same thing.

In the article the french journalist Manon Loizeau is quoted saying:"To much pain kills, to much violence on a daily bases encourage the the women to eliminate themselves".

This she wrote in a book called 'La moitié du ciel', written by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn two journalists on New York Times.In this book they write about the terrible circumstances under which millions and millions of women live, not least in the countries on the Asian continent but also elsewhere all over the globe.They find it odd (to say the least) that when a journalist, writer or any other person is captured by terrorists or in other ways maltreated, petitions are signed and people engage themselves in different ways but when women disappear or when they are tortured or killed on a daily bases in their homes and neighbourhoods, this doesn't cause much of a reaction among politicians or even intellectuals.I don't remember if it's Kristof or Wudunn that uses the word 'black hole' about the disappearances in order to exemplify the huge numbers of women lost to the world.It's however not only the intellectual or social misery that causes these disapperances but also the religion and different kinds of 'holy' or regulatory prescriptions concerning the life of man - and (not least) woman.In Islamabad and Rawalpindi, two twin cities in Pakistan, five thousand women has been judged to the pillory, stooned, thrown kerosene and acid at, abandoned by their families and sometimes burnt to death!The two journalists write about battery against women in the West too, as violence against women just because they are women, always has existed.This not least against women who are better educated, stronger and more independent than their male friends or neighbours.

I remember discussing violence against women on a wall on Facebook and there I confronted men who - as they put it - using their "kind of humour" could write things as:"In my country we use women as toilet seats"; "A good slapping..." etc etc.These men lived in the USA and different European countries, whereby we see that this phenomenon is universal.Of course one can always look upon these individuals as a group of anti-intellectual, frustrated, uneducated cowards - which of course is true for a majority of these 'men' - but on the other hand these kind of ideas reveals something profoundly aggressive and potentially dangerous and should of course be dealt with in some way.

I remember an article I read about a woman in USA being gang-raped in the open with people passing by, staying, looking, some even taking photos and others even applauding!Of course we could explain this by saying that Americans are mad and fascistic - concerning the latter it's true for a great number of Americans according to me - but this doesn't help up the situation as I don't think this is only an American dilemma.It's a question of men - religious or not - finding their earlier hegemony threatened by women being - as I wrote above - superior to them. The only mean to controle these women - as they are not willing confronting them on an intellectual level - is by using ultra violence and this is of course reprehensible in every way.Some might object and say that there are a lot of men dissapearing every year, killed in battle or taken hostage, uses as slaves or in a multitued of ways.This is of course true and equally important to fight back but the question is if the quantities are the same and if the 'ideological' basis for these disappearances are the same?Men killed in war are being prepared for this and they are aware of the dangers they will confront - more or less anyway. Often they volunteer to the job.Women just being women, doing their job and living their lives but being judged by men for things that men claim that they have done wrong, breaking laws and regulations often created by men is much worse in my opinion.

When I mentioned above that there were few reactions on the fact that so many women disappear every year I can add that I quoted the article on Facebook and normally there are one or many people commenting the articles I add but this time, I don't remember seeing many comments! Strange?!